Tucked inside yesterday's Chrome Beta update to v41 was a handy new feature for privacy-minded users and everyone who likes to practice safe web browsing. Although we updated the post with the feature, we thought it better to highlight it again in a separate article.

If you head to Chrome Beta's Settings, under Site Settings, you'll find that the Cookies option has been switched from one check box to become its own subset of options. You can still completely allow or disallow sites to save and read cookie data, but you can also disable only third-party cookies as a separate option. This should give you more granular control over which cookies can track your online browsing behavior.

As Google explains it, "there are two types of cookies: First-party cookies are set by the site domain listed in the address bar. Third-party cookies come from other domain sources that have items, such as ads or images, embedded on the page." So if you disable third-party cookies, you should still have the convenience of browsing the sites you visit without feeding them your details repeatedly, but the ads and elements included in these pages from third-parties won't be able to save their own cookies.

The feature has been available in the desktop version of Chrome for a while, and is also a staple of Firefox for Android (and maybe a few other Android browsers as well). If you use Chrome Beta, you are better off unticking that box.

I think you might be able to bypass it via a VPN, but you can't really block it indeed.

Simon Belmont

Yeah. VPN would be the one way that I would avoid (I don't use VZW, though), but I don't know many casual folks (AKA, the vast majority of their customers) that would go to that length (or be willing to pay for a decent VPN) to do that.

It's a crummy trick on Verizon's part. Bleh.

tim242

Actually, you are incorrect. It can easily be blocked by turning on "reduce data usage" in Chrome.

Simon Belmont

That's not blocking it, though. That's re-routing (bypassing it, if you will) it through Google's network (basically like the VPN thing I discussed below).